In this paper, we present a dataset consisting of data generated from 22 previously and currently running randomized controlled experiments inside the ASSISTments online learning platform. This dataset provides data mining opportunities for researchers to analyze ASSISTments data in a convenient format across multiple experiments at the same time.…

Administrative experiments are increasingly available for public programs with high-quality administrative data to identify what changes make programs and services more effective. Program administrators can run short-term experiments to test improvements in programs and have causally valid impact estimates within a year. Administrative experiments…

There are usually limited user evaluation of resources on a recommender system, which caused an extremely sparse user rating matrix, and this greatly reduce the accuracy of personalized recommendation, especially for new users or new items. This paper presents a recommendation method based on rating prediction using causal association rules.…

Two problems at two different abstraction levels of computational biology are studied. At the molecular level, efficient pattern matching algorithms in DNA sequences are presented. For gene order data, an efficient data structure is presented capable of storing all gene re-orderings in a systematic manner. A common characteristic of presented…

With the emergence of the Web 2.0, collaborative annotation practices have become more mature in the field of learning. In this context, several recent studies have shown the powerful effects of the integration of annotation mechanism in learning process. However, most of these studies provide poor support for semantically structured resources,…

We surveyed researchers in the health and exercise sciences to explore different areas and magnitudes of bias in researchers' decision making. Participants were presented with scenarios (testing a central hypothesis with p = 0.06 or p = 0.04) in a random order and surveyed about what they would do in each scenario. Participants showed significant…

Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is…

Using a scenario-based analogue experiment embedded within an online survey, 174 masters-level counseling students located at a university on the Southwest Coast of the United States provided data to test the notion that the teaching alliance--a framework for enhancing the quality of the student-instructor relationship--is (a) important in…

Learning to solve a class of problems can be characterized as a search through a space of hypotheses about the rules for solving these problems. A series of four experiments studied how different learning conditions affected the search among hypotheses about the solution rule for a simple computational problem. Experiment 1 showed that a problem…

The quantal hypothesis is central to the modern understanding of how a neurotransmitter is released from synapses. This hypothesis expresses that a neurotransmitter is packaged together in quanta that are released probabilistically. The experiments that led to the quantal hypothesis are often related in introductory neuroscience textbooks, but…

Identifying the skills that determine the success or failure to exercises and question items is a difficult task. Multiple skills may be involved at various degree of importance, and skills may overlap and correlate. In an effort towards the goal of finding the skills behind a set of items, we investigate two techniques to determine the number of…

An experiment involving 90 students in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades investigated how visual examples and grade (our surrogate for age) affected variability in a drawing task. The task involved using circles as the main element in a set of drawings. There were two examples: One was simple and single (a smiley face inside a circle); the other,…

Single-case or single-subject experimental designs (SSED) are used to evaluate the effect of one or more treatments on a single case. Although SSED studies are growing in popularity, the results are in theory case-specific. One systematic and statistical approach for combining single-case data within and across studies is multilevel modeling. The…

Aesthetic preference for the vertical composition of single-object pictures was studied through a series of two-alternative forced-choice experiments. The results reveal the influence of several factors, including spatial asymmetries in the functional properties of the object and the typical position of the object relative to the observer. With…

Spatial or temporal data mining tasks are performed in the context of the relevant space, defined by a spatial neighborhood, and the relevant time period, defined by a specific time interval. Furthermore, when mining large spatio-temporal datasets, interesting patterns typically emerge where the dataset is most dynamic. This dissertation is…